


Doll Parts

by Shaitanah



Category: Being Human, Terminator - All Media Types, Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles
Genre: Apocalypse, Crossover, Future Fic, Gen, Judgment Day, Mindfuck, Parallel Universes, Purgatory, War Child
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-09-07
Updated: 2012-09-07
Packaged: 2017-11-13 18:18:44
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,138
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/506340
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Shaitanah/pseuds/Shaitanah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The world ends many times. Possibly every day. In the future, a girl from London and a boy from LA play the your Apocalypse is better than mine game.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Doll Parts

**Author's Note:**

> **Disclaimer** : _Being Human_ belongs to Toby Whithouse and the BBC. _Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles_ belongs to Josh Friedman and FOX. The _Terminator_ franchise belongs to James Cameron et al.  
>  **A/N** : I kept making references to _Terminator_ in my Eve-centric stories, and then it invaded completely. XD This piece is choppy, experimental, illogical, stream-of-consciousness, mindfuck-y at times and, while it’s mostly based on the TV-verse, it contains oblique references to the entire franchise.

To know the future absolutely is to be trapped into that future absolutely. It collapses time. Present becomes future. I require more freedom than that.

Frank Herbert. “Children of Dune”

The voice on the other end of the line is eight hours behind and over five thousand miles away. It speaks of metal, nuclear plants and how to operate a machine gun. She tells him about whittling stakes, the siege of Buckingham Palace and how to make an incendiary bomb fueled with werewolf blood.

“What did they do to the queen?” he asks. 

They ate her, she tells him. Like they ate everyone else.

It’s not the end yet, for either of them, but sometimes she wishes it were. It would be nice to die talking to someone.

“Are there any palm-trees left?” she wants to know.

There’s nothing left, he says. Only rubble.

He sounds young, for all that he says he was born in the 1980s. “Skipped ahead a couple of times,” he tells her. She isn’t sure what exactly that means, but he chuckles, a soft sound at the backdrop of gunfire, and that’s that.

He tells her about barcodes and serial numbers; she counters with red-hot iron and the smell of burnt flesh around letters “H” and “W”. Work camps, resettlement camps, research facilities, prisons, cargo holders, furnaces. At night, she dreams of vampires breaking their fangs on metal.

You can’t reason with them, he says, meaning the tin cans.

You can’t reprogram the undead, she counters.

They’ve been jokingly playing the your Apocalypse is better than mine game for a long time now. 

“How do you save the world?” she asks, holding the scroll in her hand. They say New York has just fallen. That’s in her world; in his, New York has been a nuclear wasteland for years. 

I fight for it, he says. Naturally.

“I die for it,” she says, matter-of-factly. 

I win.

\--

“My name is John,” he introduces himself, hesitantly, like someone who hasn’t done it in a while. Everybody knows John. 

“I’m Eve.” She doesn’t make that diffident pause because she hasn’t had many chances to be Eve. She’s always been Zoe or Nina or Polly or Clare; anyone but herself.

\--

She wonders what it feels like being a machine. 

He asks her about ghosts. He seems interested. 

“They don’t feel,” they speak in unison, “not like we do.”

She doesn’t believe anyone feels like they do. 

\--

He dies in 2032, two years after Annie fades, leaving Eve alone.

Though not always. 

Sometimes Judgment Day never happens (what a big name for such a mundane event as a nuclear Apocalypse) and he gets to live a long, happy life. Sometimes everything happens but he lives on, older, younger, the same age as her. She tries to imagine a world where the revolution never happens. She would have to die for it.

They talk time-travel a lot. Blue sparks and empty corridors. Bits and pieces of memory and scrap metal cobbled together. Someday she’ll go. 

He won’t. He always sends someone back but he can’t go because he is the focal point of every timeline that converges on him. He has to stay and win.

“I still win,” she chuckles, putting on a yellow shawl and braiding her hair. On her calendar, it’s always April, 2037. 

\--

“Call me when you get there,” he says jokingly, but she won’t because J-Day happens in 2011, 2005, 2004, 2003, 1997. Eve is going back to 2012. Those are just numbers. Years before she was born. Years before she was thought of. 

\--

In 2037, he is twenty-six on a good day. Sometimes he is fifty-two or forty-five or whatever he is when he is not moving, but then he doesn’t really know her. He is too busy fighting the tin cans or being dead, having been killed five years before. He is maybe married or maybe looking for someone, and she is neither of those things. 

Eve dies at the age of twenty-five, a knife wound inflicted at her request.

“Could you do it?” she asks him. “Die to save the world. Could you do it?”

No, he says. It’s not the way I was brought up.

He tells her about Central America, learning to shoot a rifle, learning Spanish. 

“Sometimes living is harder than dying,” he says. “No, it’s always harder than dying.”

She tells him about the pandemonium at the docks and that time she almost made it to France. 

“Have you ever tried–?” he begins and doesn’t finish, but she knows what he means. She remembers people taking their own lives, leaving their bodies for the vampires to find and feed on, back when they didn’t know if the myth about dead man’s blood was true or false.

No, she says, half-lying.

“Have you?”

Maybe, he mutters. Remembers that time with a shotgun. 

When she finally dies, she asks a soldier to do it for her. Suicide leaves too little room for unfinished business.

\--

London was destroyed in the aftermath of Judgment Day. Fifteen million people died but the city had no strategic significance for Skynet. April 21, 2011 was when Judgment Day happened. Almost a year later, on April 11, 2012 the vampire revolution took place.

When they talk about it, they sound like history books.

“We should have a party,” he suggests. Some time _after_.

“I make a bloody good cup of tea,” she says.

He laughs. “I could make pasta… I think.”

\--

When the Old Ones are gone and Annie has passed over, Eve doesn’t expect to stay. Fading is not painful. It’s not even frightening. It’s just something that is supposed to happen after the hero has completed the quest. 

“I wouldn’t give up so easily,” John says. He looks even younger than he sounds, yesterday’s teenager.

There is a room for non-existent people like them. The kettle is boiling and there is a bowl of spaghetti on the table. There is even a special utensil for scooping it up on the plate.

There is a room here for everyone. Scraps of lives hastily put together. Puzzle pieces that both fit and don’t fit. This is something that happens when you stop fighting. 

Outside, there are still bleached skulls and bare bones, bloodless carcasses and cooked flesh. Then again, maybe not. Not always. 

Eve pours him a cup of tea. He’s American; he probably won’t appreciate her mad skills. 

“So what happens next?” she asks.

John shrugs. He died before he met her and she died before she met him. Things like that only ever happen on the other side.

“You know what I’m thinking about?” he says. “It’s the first time in… a long time that I don’t know what day it is today.”

Eve ponders it and smiles.

Yeah. That’s nice.

_September 6–7, 2012_


End file.
